1/ By amending no more than THREE WORDS of the Immigration & Nationality Act, Congress could amend a 91-yr-old law to grant a pathway to citizenship to millions of undocumented Americans in a piece of legislation shorter than this tweet.

Really: three words!

Here's how:

2/ Loosely speaking, the U.S. had virtually open borders for everyone other than Chinese/East Asians until 1917.

The visa system was then formalized in 1924 based on white supremacist "national origins quotas" explicitly designed to favor white northern/western Europeans.

3/ As strange as this is to think of today, we simply weren't keeping good track of who was coming to the country at a federal level until 1906 and there was no mandatory requirement that new immigrants register with the government once here.

There wouldn't be until 1940.

4/ This poor record-keeping coincided w/a time when more immigrants came to the U.S. in proportion to the existing population than at any other time in U.S. history--*including today,* per the orange line in this helpful chart from @MigrationPolicy

5/ The 1924 Immigration & Nationality Act shifted the immigration process from a rubber-stamp at arrival to an application process in home countries which only became more complex with time. (That said, visas were basically first-come first-serve w/in quota limits until 1965)

6/ The 1924 Act created millions of undocumented Americans who hadn't previously needed to concern themselves with proving either lawful entry or "immigration status." There was really no such thing; the closest to that point were registrations required for (optional) citizenship

7/ Congress addressed this in 1929 by creating the "registry," an easy legalization provision for those who could prove that they were present as of June 3, 1921 & were not barred on existing criminal/medical/moral grounds.

Amnesty? Yes.

Controversial? No.

Just housekeeping.

8/ The #registry was updated three times after 1929, to:

1) July 1, 1924 (in 1940)
2) June 28, 1940 (in 1958)
3) January 1, 1972 (in 1986)

It's still law today.

I've never met anyone who's been undocumented & off the radar since 1972, but there's got to be someone out there!

9/ The concept of the "undocumented alien" as we know it today was invented in 1965, when we ended quota-based migration and required that visas be tied to family ties or high-skilled employment--with no effective solution for the migrant labor our economy has always depended on.

10/ Hard to imagine now, but there really wasn't the kind of popular national fury over undocumented immigration we're so used to now before then, & really before the '94 Prop 187 campaign in CA. Imm. law was generally seen as malleable, and reasonably easy to amend to our needs.

11/ The last time the registry was updated in 1986, more Dems than Rs voted against it.

And now, w/in the span of my 40 years alone, immigration has become so radically politicized in this country that it is truly impossible to have an adult conversation. I've tried many times.

12/ The last best chance at bipartisan imm. reform came and went in 2007, and the Senate passed a reasonably decent bill in 2013 which Rs refused to bring to the House floor. Both included complex paths to citizenship for the undocumented, but neither (AFAIK) updated the registry

13/ Here's the current registry law, as contained in INA §249. As immigration law goes, it is a masterpiece of elegance and simplicity.

Just needs one tiny little three-word update.

Can you spot it?

14/ If you guessed that the update should be replacing "January 1, 1972" with a more recent date, your prize is the simplest and most effective immigration reform Congress could ever hope to pass.

It's a really good prize.

15/ Once Congress accepted that this proposal is the most reasonable and efficient way to address the intractable issue of millions of people now present in the U.S. who can now be neither legalized or deported under current law, the only real debate would be the new date itself.

16/ If it were up to me the new date would be 1/1/2020. Nice, simple, easy to remember! But politically impossible.

The registry's original purpose is to bring long-time residents out of the shadows, and the shortest it's ever been was the original 8-yr period in '29. So, 2012?

17/ My proposed legislation can fit comfortably into one tweet:

"'January 1, 1972' is hereby stricken from 8 USC 1259(a) and replaced with January 1, 2012."

Or something like that! I'm generally on the receiving end of laws, not the making part

18/ I truly believe that this is the solution to a problem which we can no longer afford to ignore.

I am totally serious about this.

19/ Registry applicants should pay the same fee for residency as everyone else, but this won't sell. In the alternative, we could save USCIS from its massive $1.2 billion budget shortfall by imposing an extra penalty fee as has been done in the past https://twitter.com/matt_cam/status/1277727678230147072

20/ This one three-word amendment would also spare us all another grueling round of sausage-making. No midnight amendments, no terrible compromises, no drawn-out debates. It would all just come down to the date.

21/ Until very recently in US history, immigration status was a flexible concept. It was almost absurdly easy to regularize the status of someone who had been here without permission, either through existing law or through *changing the law.* We used to do it constantly.

22/ The more people with strong ties to this country we allow to legally participate in it, the better off we all are. There's no better recent proof of this than the #DACA program.

https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/overcoming-the-odds-the-contributions-of-daca-eligible-immigrants-and-tps-holders-to-the-u-s-economy/

23/ #Registryreform is an elegant, efficient, and politically viable solution based squarely in existing law to bring millions out of the shadows, grow the American economy, and strengthen our social fabric.

Let's do it!

(That's it. That's the thread.)